Criticism
A professor of Kabbalah at Hebrew University of Jerusalem has bemoaned the hijacking of kabba'lah by various New Age authors and has given Halevi as an example. Joseph Dan, in his work The Heart and the Fountain: An Anthology of Jewish Mystical Experiences, writes in footnote 57 to the introduction:
- Another distressing phenomenon is connected with the numerous books concerning kabbalah, its history, nature, and traditions, as instruction for modern living, published by "Z'ev ben Shimon Halevi" who is a nice English gentleman from Hampstead who does not know any Hebrew. His books were used as authentic, scholarly source by many, including Simo Parpola.
In 'Authorized Guardians' in Polemical Encounters (Olav Hammer and Kocku von Stuckrad (ed.), Leiden:Brill, 2007; p. 89) Prof. Boaz Huss at Ben-Gurion university points at the fact that the criticism launched at Halevi does appear in the chapter 'The christian kabbalah'. These and other attempts can be viewed as 'boundary-constructing discourse' and 'othering of the enemy', depicting him as 'debased' or 'degenerated' in order to annihilate him (cp. Huss in Hammer/Von Stuckrad, 2007, xiii). Halevi lives in the London borough of Brent.
Read more about this topic: Z'ev Ben Shimon Halevi
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“A friend of mine spoke of books that are dedicated like this: “To my wife, by whose helpful criticism ...” and so on. He said the dedication should really read: “To my wife. If it had not been for her continual criticism and persistent nagging doubt as to my ability, this book would have appeared in Harper’s instead of The Hardware Age.””
—Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)